Melting Pot Drum Group

Drumming For Health

This group started out accidently becoming a drum group. During 1992 in June,Reggie Workman, Steve Habib and Marvin Bu Ga Lu Smith were talking about a performance at Visiones in NYC. The result was Habib and Smith co produced the session and it was recorded by Jon Rosenberg and Thomas Tedesco. CeCil McBee was the bass player along with Kirk Lightsey on piano,Kevin Lager,trumpet,Jim Finn soprano/tenor and Marvin Bu Ga Lu Smith on drums. Both Habib and Smith arranged all the music and some original work Habiba by Kirk Lightsey and The Peacemaker by Cecil McBee were also part of the original recordings of the 5 day festival. Marvin's original name for the group was The Experience but it evolved into Melting Pot Drum Group as everyone started to motivate us to form an all drum group that could play songs without other instruments. Thomas DeSteno and Tom Tedesco took an interest in the concept and recordings were made with everyone from Hugh Brodie on soprano/tenor and Steve Cohen on piano along with Kevin Jones and many others all over a period of time from the start of The War during 2001 right up to the present time. The group did perform in Montclair's Luna Space with Thomas DeSteno,Marvin Bu Ga Lu Smith,Steve Habib and Tom Tedesco and was very well received by a large audience. Little has been done to promote the group and their concept and most of the players have been involved with other projects as hard times have forced everyone to do whatever they had to do to survive. The group is ready to go now. An example of the group's instrumentation protocol is Habib being the bass player,walking and doing what a regular bass player would do but Habib uses Timpani and floor tom toms as a bass player. The group sounds like it has a conventional bass player. Today, Melting Pot Drum Group is an entity that many bands have wanted to add to their trios,quartets,quintets or larger groups,having an entire self contained drum unit that adds multi dimension to the drum line as opposed to having only one drummer to enhance swing. The group will be performing at its first major Jazz Festival event in the fall of 2010. More will be said about this in the next few months.
Thomas DeSteno,